LB's Rambles

The Universal Library

As a writer, I admire the philosophers who tell me that our dreams have infinite scope and breadth and can find unlimited expression in our writings.

As the husband of a librarian, however, I am fascinated by the indisputable mathematical fact that the number of ways in which those ideas - about anything - can be expressed is, in fact, a finite number, based solely upon the number of letters in the alphabet (and other symbols we use in writing).

A century ago, a German writer, Kurd Lasswitz, did the math and wrote a short story called "The Universal Library." It has been a favorite of mine since high school days. While written in German, it was translated into English by the popular science writer, the late Willy Ley.

Lasswitz sets certain rules for the library, the better to quantify things. All capitals, lower case letters, numbers, etc., plus important symbols can be used - say a total of 100 characters, all in a single typeface. The size of each book is set to 500 pages - shorter books would simply be left blank, for a blank space would be one of the characters; longer books would break into multiple volumes. Each page has 40 lines, with fifty characters per line. So each book would have room for 50 times 40 times 500 characters, or a total of one million characters per book.

Still with me? The first volume would be completely blank - that is the "blank" character is repeated 1 million times. The second volume is blank until the last position on the last page, where an "a" appears. In the third volume, the "a" has moved up one place. And so on - the "a" moving up through the one million positions in each successive volume until it reaches the beginning, to be replaced by each of the successive 99 characters. So much for the first 100 million volumes. The next volume would begin with "aa" in the last two positions, and the two-letter combinations would move up through the next 100 million volumes - and so on, until you had every possible combination of every character.

There are, of course, some practical difficulties. While the library must, of necessity, contain a complete and accurate index to itself, it must also contain every false and erroneous index. Every truth, great and small, would be offset by every lie; there would, quite obviously, be huge sections of the library that are merely gibberish - or that begin, perhaps, with a sonnet by Shakespeare and then turn into gibberish. Finding the useful books would be challenging, to say the least.

But the point is that the universal library is NOT infinite. It is finite, because it is created by publishing books that contain every conceivable combination of the characters of the alphabet. The total number of volumes needed can be written quite easily, too, as 10^2,000,000 - or a 1 followed by 2 million zeros. That number is beyond astronomical; it is far too large for us to grasp, let alone name. Lasswitz goes on to calculate the number of universes packed with books that would be needed to hold the library - well you get the idea.

He's not arguing that we don't have the infinite capacity to dream - just that it is possible to determine exactly how many books would be needed to contain every idea we can possibly communicate. That number is finite - unimaginably large, impossible ever to do, but finite.

If interested, you can find this story in Clifton Fadiman's marvelous anthology of fantasy and science fiction based on mathematical themes, "Fantasia Mathematica," which has been one of my favorites for half a century. I highly recommend it.

Blogging: You Get What You Pay For

Just wasted an hour trying to help a friend, whose company is trying to get a new blog off the ground. Part of the problem is that the company elected to go with Google 's "Blogger" software.

While I admire a lot of what Google does, I'm no fan of Blogger. I find it awkward to use as a blogger and near-impossible to use as a commenter. The software, for me, makes it far too easy to lose whatever work you may be doing.

If I were starting a corporate blog, I think I'd be looking more closely at Typepad (which provides the software for this blog among many others) or WordPress. Cost ranges from free to a few bucks a month - and, if you pay to upgrade, you get what you pay for. Both services make it pretty easy for company IT people to integrate their blogs into their websites.

The Monitor Goes Down

Distressing news today from the Christian Science Monitor: the venerable and highly-regarded paper is going to cease daily publication of its print edition. According to the report from Online Media Daily, the good news is that the Monitor will be re-investing its resources in its online edition and also plans to start up a weekly print edition, together with an electronic subscription-based newsletter.

I have always had a lot of respect for the Monitor, and I hope the institution will survive. But the move is extremely sensible, and we are going to see a good deal more of this kind of thing, particularly given the downturn in the economy.

"Overall macro-trends definitely played a roll here," [CSM editor John] Yemma said. "Every paper that I know is struggling with essentially a broken business model that includes unnecessary production costs, awful deadlines and a horrible carbon footprint."

More details, obviously, at the above link.

Newspaper Survival

In my last post, I noted the round of belt tightening at big media outlets, and I noted that it all paled in significance next to the mammoth upheaval in the newspaper industry. Obviously, we have all seen the reports on circulation and advertising nosedives at papers large and small. Now, Media Futurist Jack Myers has another fairly gloomy assessment of what's been happening: newspapers, he says, have to change or wind up in the tar pits like the dinosaurs too many have become.

Myers is quite blunt about placing the blame:

If newspapers had focused on their business as "news" rather than "papers," they would most likely have invested heavily in digital ventures beginning in the mid-1990s, and established themselves as the primary source for locally relevant content. But they didn't and now, for the most part, they are just one of many competitors with little unique differentiation and a weak business model. Newspaper companies have been unwilling and unable to embrace change.

Yes, he says, some print media can emerge from this stronger - but only by adopting new, successful strategies and reinventing themselves - and their brands. It's a thoughtful piece, well worth your reading time.

Belt Tightening

The New York Observer has gotten hold of a memo from ABC News chief David Westin, announcing some belt tightening on expenses. When you compare what he wants - execs need to stay in "B" hotels, cut back on air travel, no holiday parties, that kind of thing - it's pretty trivial, compared to the drastic cutbacks in personnel and organization size at so many newspapers. But it's indicative that even the media giants like Disney/ABC aren't immune from the slowdown.

The one item that caught my eye, though was:

As of December 1, we will cancel all subscriptions (newspaper and magazine) for executives and production employees and move them to on-line. This change will have the added benefit of helping the environment. If there are particular circumstances where you believe this will materially impair your ability to get your work done, you should make your case to your executive producer or supervisorby November 15th.

it's that line, "move them to on-line." That's the irreversible trend in the industry today, and it's going to be as true for the TV news divisions as it is for the newspapers and other print media. It's past time that the news industry figure out how to keep doing what they have the potential to do best - collect the news - and make money at it. Otherwise, we're all going to be losers.

Hat tip: ShopTalk

"Death on Milestone Buttress"

All right, I'm a coward - I get chills at the thought of mountain climbing; clinging by my fingers and toes to the side of a cliff a few thousand feet up is not my idea of a great weekend. But mountain climbing is a hugely popular sport. It also makes an unusual setting for murder. "Death on Milestone Buttress," by Glyn Carr, was the first in a series of mountain-climbing murder stories. It's a great read - and, for those of you who like locked room/impossible crime mysteries, it's a fine specimen. You can listen to my full audio review on the "Classic Mysteries" podcast - and there's more information (and lots more book reviews and commentary) available here.

Everybody's Being Social

Here's a new study from Forrester Research, as reported in Adweek, that finds 75% of Internet users now say they use some form of social media and/or networking, which is up from 56% a year earlier.

Fine, and probably not much of a surprise - as the magazine asks rhetorically, does it seem sometimes as if everyone you know is on Facebook and/or MySpace? I was struck, though, by a very low number: only 19% say they make use of RSS feeds or Internet tagging. That seems a bit peculiar: I find RSS invaluable for keeping myself updated on a variety of websites, blogs, podcasts, etc.; a quick check of my RSS program shows me at a glance what's new. I still think that RSS is going to continue to grow - there's certainly plenty of room for it.

Hat tip: MediaPost's Online Media Daily

You Got Trouble

If you want to know why the trust ratings for mainstream news media are dropping nearly as fast as Congressional approval ratings, take a look at the latest findings from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 70% of the public say they believe the media wants Barack Obama to win the Presidential race. Only 9% think media bias favors John McCain. Apparently, that's true across party lines - Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

By way of contrast, at this point in 2004, Pew found 50% of the public believing that the media favored Kerry and 22% said Bush. That's lopsided, but nothing like the current figures.

Add to that another Pew study, released earlier this week, that found the news media's coverage of Obama more positive than negative, while McCain received "significantly" more negative coverage than positive in the time period between the GOP convention and the last Presidential debate.

As someone who spent more than 30 years as a journalist (for a major broadcast network), I find these statistics both appalling and inexcusable. For the most part, I get my news online these days, because I don't like either the TV coverage or the print coverage - I find it heavily biased. Apparently, so do a lot of other people. I think that's dangerous for our society.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Multimedia: Deja Vu All Over Again...

...as Yogi Berra might have said. My former colleagues over at Business Wire are running yet another free webinar today trying to convince communications holdouts about the importance of using some multimedia to accompany their text press releases.

I find it hard to believe that there are still holdouts, but - given my own experience dealing with people like that - perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I can tell you that if you're a PR person with a message to get out, you had better figure out a way to do so that doesn't involve just sending out a press release. I can pretty well guarantee it will be ignored. Photos, video - and, for that matter, audio and other forms of multimedia content - are essential these days, to grab the attention of not only web-savvy journalists, but of web-savvy customers and consumers. Ignore at your peril.

Astroturfing

Over at the Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog, Sally Falkow has a good commentary today on the discredited (to be polite) web tactic known as astroturfing. As you can probably guess, that's the practice of using phony posts/tweets/comments to make it appear that you have grass roots support, and it's far too common among some PR people, not to mention political commentators and more than a few bloggers.

Let me offer two absolutes here, if you're ever tempted to astroturf in an effort to make it seem that you're promoting something far more effectively than you are:

1. You WILL be found out.

2. You WILL be publicly humiliated and ridiculed at best.

As Sally Falkow says, don't do it.